Quotes from Roland Barthes

I-love-you is active. It affirms itself as force--against other forces. Which ones? The thousand forces of the world, which are, all of them, disparaging forces (science, doxa, reality, reason, etc) Or again: against language.

But when a myth reaches the entire community, it is from the latter than the mythologist must become estranged if he wants to liberate the myth.

As proffering, I love you is on the side of expenditure. Those who seek the proffering of the word (lyric poets, liars, wanderers) are subjects of expenditure; they spend the word as if it were impertinent (base) that it be recovered somewhere; they are at the extreme limit of language, where language itself...recognizes that it is without backup or guarantee, working without a net

The dream: to know a foreign language yet not to understand it: to perceive the difference in it without that difference ever being recuperated by the superficial sociality of discourse, communication or vulgarity... to undo our own "reality" under the effect of other formulations, other syntaxes... in a word, to descend into the untranslatable.

Du passé, c'est mon enfance qui me fascine le plus ; elle seule, à la regarder, ne me donne pas le regret du temps aboli. Car ce n'est pas l'irréversible que je découvre en elle, c'est l'irréductible : tout ce qui reste encore en moi, par accès.

Writing, on the contrary, is always rooted in something beyond language, it develops like a seed, not like a line, it manifests an essence and holds the threat of a secret, it is an anti­ communication, it is intimidating.

This, which is true of the literary modes of writing, in which the unity of the signs is ceaselessly fascinated by zones of infra- or ultra-language, is even truer of the political ones, in which the alibi stem­ming from language is at the same time intimidation and glorification : for it is power or conflict which produce the purest types of writing.

I am through with *not enough* Henceforth I live in the definitive assumption of the Image-repertoire, its triumph.

either the intention of the myth is too obscure to be efficacious, or it is too clear to be believed. In either case, where is the ambiguity? This is but a false dilemma. Myth hides nothing and flaunts nothing: it distorts; myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion. […] driven to having either to unveil or to liquidate the concept, it will naturalize it. We reach here the very principle of myth: it transforms history into nature.

Myth, on the contrary, is a language which does not want to die: it wrests from the meanings which give it its sustenance an insidious, degraded survival, it provokes in them an artificial reprieve in which it settles comfortably, it turns them into speaking corpses.

Aucun n'est d'un métal si pur qu'il laisse l'autre sans voix.

A conjuring trick has taken place; it has turned reality inside out, it has emptied it of history and has filled it with nature, it has removed from things their human meaning so as to make them signify a human insignificance. The function of myth is to empty reality: it is, literally , a ceaseless flowing out, a haemorrhage, or perhaps an evaporation, in short a perceptible absence

In reality, it is unimportant that I have no likelihood of being really fulfilled (I am quite willing for this to be the case). Only the will to fulfillment shines, indestructible, before me.

Voler son langage à un homme au non même du langage, tous les meurtres légaux commencent par là.

I experience reality as a system of power. Coluche, the restaurant, the painter, Rome on a holiday, everything imposes on me its system of being; everyone is *badly behaved*. Isn't their impoliteness merely a *plenitude*? The world is full, plenitude is its system, and as a final offense this system is presented as a nature with which I must sustain good relations: in order to be normal (exempt from love)... —from_A Lover's Discourse: Fragments_

Todo lo que es anacrónico es obsceno. Como divinidad (moderna), la Historia es represiva, la Historia nos prohíbe ser inactuales. Del pasado, no soportamos más que la ruina, el monumento, el kitsch o el retro, que es divertido; reducimos ese pasado a su sola rúbrica.

Le mythe est une parole choisie par l'histoire : il ne saurait surgir de la « nature » des choses.

Reverberation makes reception into an intelligible din, and the lover into a monstrous receiver, reduced to an enormous auditive organ--as if listening itself were to become a state of utterance; in me, it is the ear which speaks

History is hysterical: it is constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it—and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it.

Tautology creates a dead, a motionless world.

Nije li najbolnija to?ka tog žalovanja u tome što moram izgubiti jedan jezik - ljubavni jezik? Svršeno je s onim 'Volim te.')

Il m'importe peu de savoir si Dieu existe ou non ; mais ce que je sais et que je saurai jusqu'au bout, c'est qu'il n'aurait pas dû créer en même temps l'amour et la mort. Le Neutre, c'est ce Non irréductible : un Non comme suspendu devant les endurcissements de la foi et de la certitude et incorruptible par l'une et par l'autre.

The saint is first and foremost a being without formal context; the idea of fashion is antipathetic to the idea of sainthood.

This is the meaning of what is euphemistically called *dialogue*: not to listen to each other, but to submit in common to an egalitarian principle of the distribution of language goods.